wellio: Using AI to help people buy and make healthy, home-cooked meals

About wellio

Founded in 2017, San Francisco-based wellio has developed an AI-based platform designed to help people plan, shop, prepare, and enjoy healthy meals at home. wellio customers can receive personalized meal recipes based on their dietary needs and have the ingredients delivered to their homes from local grocery stores.

In the summer of 2018, wellio was acquired by the Kraft Heinz Company to form the technology core of the company's new evolv group – a spin-out focused using technology solutions to help people eat better.

wellio's mission is to provide a virtual personal chef/nutritionist that designs personalized menus around a person's dietary needs, shops for the ingredients, and delivers the groceries just a few hours later. For help developing the dynamic services, wellio turned to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to leverage the platform's machine learning and data analytics at scale.

Google Cloud Results

Cuts expenses 5x by easily scaling to process variable data volumes

Accommodates large data volumes, but wellio pays only when data is queried

Develops and iterates go-to-market features 2x faster

Speeds deployment of authentication and other security controls by 50%

Reduces ML model development time by 8x

Enabling Change

Solutions: Develop Applications That Use Machine Learning

wellio built a system on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that captures raw culinary and nutrition data by reviewing multiple sources on the internet, including social networks, recipe sites, and Wikipedia. Staff chefs also add recipes and notes into Sheets, and the system can pull from that data source as well.

Above all, GCP helps the lean startup's developers be ultra efficient in order to bring wellio services to consumers as quickly as possible. For example, GCP enables wellio to do more with its small team of data scientists — a major advantage, because hiring data scientists in a tight labor market is difficult.

"Offloading some of the heavy lifting in developing machine learning models to Cloud AutoML is a huge accelerator, because the work can be done in days instead of weeks," explains Erik Andrejko, Co-founder and CTO at wellio. "Our data scientists can then focus on other challenges and needs that will help differentiate our business and reduce our new opportunity costs."

Similarly, wellio can employ only one part-time DevOps engineer. "With GKE, we can version our deployed machine learning models inside containers, which automates a lot of the work that would have otherwise been done manually," Erik says. "This helps us focus on developing the features and capabilities of our application instead of deploying and managing models."

GKE also enables wellio to easily manage runtime and production environments and to autoscale as needed to support occasional extreme fluctuations of data volume in its data pipeline.

"Even though we're a lean startup, Google Cloud Platform enables us to train a machine learning model on hundreds of terabytes of data in about one week. The process would have traditionally taken eight weeks to accomplish."

—Erik Andrejko, Co-founder and CTO, wellio

About wellio

Founded in 2017, San Francisco-based wellio has developed an AI-based platform designed to help people plan, shop, prepare, and enjoy healthy meals at home. wellio customers can receive personalized meal recipes based on their dietary needs and have the ingredients delivered to their homes from local grocery stores.

In the summer of 2018, wellio was acquired by the Kraft Heinz Company to form the technology core of the company's new evolv group – a spin-out focused using technology solutions to help people eat better.